Tell me about your first day of training..

Lisa

Lisa

Don't get Chewed!
MTS Alumni
I will never forget my first day of training. I was nervous and didn't think, after watching my children's class, that it was going to be all that hard. I was very wrong, but I was very hooked at the end of it. I enjoyed learning the new kicks and how to properly fall. The school was not a real "serious" place so there was lots of smiling and lots of laughter.

How about you? What brought you there and what kept you?
 
matt.m said:
As a kid I went to dads class to workout and be around him and his friends. It was a great way to stay in shape along with wrestling. I came back as a way to deal with disabilities, I am hooked. There is no doubt. I will quit the 12th of never.
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Wow, Matt. That is such and excellent memory to have, how lucky for you to have that to share with your Dad.

If I may be so bold, what were the disabilities?
 
walked cocky as all getout into lee sprague's kickboxing class. here's me: wrestler, weightlifter, scrapper and brawler out to become an even badder ***.

small catch: this is in albuquerque, nm. elevation 5400. i came from eugene, oregon. elevation in three digits.

i had to lie down and put my feet up, but daaaaamn i loved every vertical second of it.

j
 
bushidomartialarts said:
walked cocky as all getout into lee sprague's kickboxing class. here's me: wrestler, weightlifter, scrapper and brawler out to become an even badder ***.

small catch: this is in albuquerque, nm. elevation 5400. i came from eugene, oregon. elevation in three digits.

i had to lie down and put my feet up, but daaaaamn i loved every vertical second of it.

j
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LOL! That is soooo funny! How long did you have to train before you adjusted?
 
My first day....

First a little background: I was a senior in high school in super small town North Dakota. So being from said small town I was obligated to participate in every sport we had in order for us to have enough to field a team (I wouldn't have had it any other way though ~ just love to compete!!) Anyway, we only have one gym obviously so in the winter we had 2 practices (boys basketball and girls volleyball) that had to share the gym. So one week the boys got early practice 3:30-5:30 and we got late 5:30 -7:30. However, the TKD class that I was dying to try started at 7:30 in a town 15 miles away. Much to the dismay of my teammates, coaches, and every volleyball loving member of the community, I joined TKD anyway, leaving VB practice at 7 so I could go to TKD. Needless to say, my VB playing time got cut, but I didn't care, I was in love!!!

Oh so the actual first class? It was a perfect room that we trained in: an old aerobics room, wood floor, mirrors on one wall. Loved the knuckle pushups on that floor. I felt like such a tough chick!! Learning the new techniques I knew I looked like a dork (mirrors on the front wall) but I didn't care, it just made me want to kick and punch all day till I would look like my instructor. Fast forward a few years and that is still my (ever elusive) goal.

Great thread, I need to call work and tell them I got lost in nostalgia-land...hmmm...i thought Memory Lane was around here somewhere???
 
Oiy... I remember less about the first day than the First Day After!

My first Martial Arts class was in Kyokushinkai Karate in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. The instructor was a complete hard-a@# and an ego-tist to boot! I kicked and punched as best I could and sweated like a pig. It was rough but it had that aspect of the mysterious that I liked.

The next day I could barely move. I went to work and remember climbing the stairs to my office in agony. I hurt in places I didn't know you could hurt in...

I didn't pursue that style for very long. Many of the instructors had ego problems and were completely focussed on competition which was just not my path. Years later after I had been studying the FMA I did a demo at a competition and we WOWED them! My Instructor and I finished with a live blade demo that rocked the place! As it turned out that my old Karate School was attending the competition and one of my old instructors recognized me. After the demo he decided to come over to say hi. He turned to my FMA Instructor and said: "I remember Rob from many years ago. He was one of my Karate Students.. and not a very good one as I remember.." We all laughed, he wandered off, my Instructor turned to me and said "Who WAS that Jerk?". Ahh memories... *grin*

Rob.."a somewhat better student..."
 
Dude, I have got to say that you have told a good story. To be honest I don't have a bad instructor story. However, I do have a bad red belt story.

A few years ago I went to a school from the one I was used to. I already had a brown in Judo and had wrestled for few years for the U.S. Marine Corps.

Long story short, I was stretching and doing my thing. Some of the little kids were shadowing me. Some red belt came up to me and said "We don't do things like the other school here." However I just told her to get bent and leave me alone.

Needless to say, this same person is still a red belt. Has been for 6 years.

I hate jerks. Some people just don't understand how a martial arts environment is supposed to be a nurturing environment. Sounds like you found a good school with a good teacher. Kudos bro.
 
matt.m said:
Dude, I have got to say that you have told a good story. To be honest I don't have a bad instructor story. However, I do have a bad red belt story.

A few years ago I went to a school from the one I was used to. I already had a brown in Judo and had wrestled for few years for the U.S. Marine Corps.

Long story short, I was stretching and doing my thing. Some of the little kids were shadowing me. Some red belt came up to me and said "We don't do things like the other school here." However I just told her to get bent and leave me alone.

Needless to say, this same person is still a red belt. Has been for 6 years.

I hate jerks. Some people just don't understand how a martial arts environment is supposed to be a nurturing environment. Sounds like you found a good school with a good teacher. Kudos bro.
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matt,

Thanks man! Your red belt story is a perfect example of an MAJ (Martials Arts Jerk!).. *smile* I guess you are bound to find them anywhere but it is particularly sad when you see them in a position of authority like being a Martial Arts Instructor.

Since that rather unimpressive beginning I have been blessed with quite a few wonderful instructors, and some less than wonderful as well... I'll tell you about my impatient Tai Chi Instructor sometime! *grin* By and large though I have been very fortunate and I strive to be the kind of Instructor that earns and keeps his students respect by helping them grow, not intimidating them into subservience.

Rob
 
My first day training in the art I still practice was an eye opening day. I NEVER thought that something so fustrating, difficult, & uncomprehensable (at the time) could be so darn addicting. I did try other arts before this one and really have a hard time thinking of them as "training" because they didn't feel like this to me. I can feel the day after in my memory still though. Oh man I didn't know so many parts could ache at the same time.

From the moment I stepped into the Dojo I knew I had found a second home. That is a great feeling and one I still get every single time I walk into training. Even though I now train at a different location, the feeling is the same.
 
Let's see...I was 14 years old the first time I stepped foot in a martial art class (Tae Kwon Do). My youngest brother (who was 10 years old) and I joined at the same time. I was very intimidated to see that some of the kids my age were black belts. After the warm up, one of the young black belts took my brother and I aside. We spent practically the entire class learning the front stance, downward block, and the forward punch.

My first Yagyu Shinkage Ryu class was about ten years later. I came to class in my old TKD uniform (which still fit me!), and quickly felt out of place amongst the other students dressed in dark blue keikogi and hakama. I borrowed one of the dojo swords; it was some cheap wallhanger katana that was a couple inches too long for me. I spent that class learning the first kihon, and how to properly draw the sword, chiburi and noto. My sensei noticed that I was having problems with the longer sword (overall length was about 40"), and brought a short gunto to class a couple weeks later for me to use. Using a shorter sword definitely helped. I bought my own uniform and iaito about a month later.

Oh yeah...forgot to mention my first day at Aikido - just two and a half weeks ago. I was a combination of nervous and confident at the same time. Though it was my first day at a "new" art (my Aikido class back in college really doesn't count), I was kinda at ease, because I was already acquainted with my sensei (my Yagyu sensei rents dojo space from him). It was a weapons class, and we were using the jo staff. I caught on some of the moves fairly quickly, since I have a little experience with the bo staff. Of course I was totally lost by the end of the class; we were running through part of a kata, which went completely over my head.
 
I was 14 and we just moved to FL from NJ. I had no friends of my own and only knew my cousin and his friends. My father brought me to the YMCA so I had something to do and could meet people on my own.

I went to the Karate class (actually it was TKD) and met Mr. Jones, who would soon become more like a big brother than a Karate teacher.

The first thing we did in that class, after bowing in was knuckle pushups on a hard tile floor. That really hurt. Then the hardest workout I had ever done up to that point in my life (including football practice), which was interspersed with more knuckle pushups - we probably did a total of 75. But I was learning to fight and it was just so cool.
 
When I first started ma, I was six years old, and enraptured in the "coolness" and tales of ma. One of the instructors sat me down and explained things to me and my parents. Then he gave me a short private lesson on the basics of ma. However my first real class with other people I don't really remember so well.
 
When I was 20 and in college, I was dragged in, in the hopes that the guy I was dating would quit trying to demonstrate and make me do half-remembered blocks from his own training in high school, 12 or 13 years previously, and because he had talked me into trying TKD as a form of exercise we could do together. After the warmup (20 minutes of stretching and calisthenics), I was sent into the back room with a female black belt, who spent the next hour showing me 2 basic stances (walking/back stance and L/front stance), and one block; toward the end of the time she also showed me sitting (horse) stance and how to punch. The second class was much the same, but with a different black belt... so was the third... by the fourth class, I was hooked - I had bought a dobak I could scarcely afford for a class that didn't require it unless and until your first testing. That was February 1987... and I'm still with the same sahbum, the only student left out everyone who was there at that time.
 
My first day was simply put, a humiliating disaster. I've been an athlete my entire life and knew, as many people my age, I was overweight and out of shape. I actually had to sit down half way through it, because my instructor thought I was going to have a heart attack. Probably would've too. I was so disgusted with what I had become, I signed up for a year despite absolutly HATING the class. I didn't take my next class for over 2 weeks because I couldn't move. Within a few weeks of that, once I started seeing improvement, well, the rest is history. Now I'm just known as the local martial arts nut case. :)
 
My first day was 2 years ago, June 1st. At the time the class was pretty small. Our instructor often does an exercise in warmups where you lay on your back and lift your legs six inches off the ground. You then alternate between legs apart and together, point your heels and your toes, and six inches and twleve inches. I didn't know my instructor then (I met him on a fishing trip) and when he told us he'd be right back (of course this is after we'd had our legs up for a while already, and I had not worked abs for a long time) we were wondering after a few minutes when he would. Luckily it was just a joke and he came back shortly. Ever since then I do not miss my ab exercises often. Oh yeah and then there was the time he convinced us to all do the Karate Kid stance and then laughed for a while. But of course I'm still there and also HOOKED!
 
I was nervous, and it was intimidating, confusing, hard, strenuous, stressful, sweaty, but also fulfilling and most importantly just what I was looking for.

I knew after that 1st night that I was in it for the long term. I was already looking forward to moving beyond 10th gup that night.
 
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